How to Sleep on a Plane

More than two million travelers will board commercial airplanes today. Check-in kiosks. Sockfeet at security. Overhead storage.

Some passengers, hurtling through clouds, will prepare spreadsheets as if they’d never left their desks. Others will read Stieg Larsson or the Koran. Still others will morbidly contemplate the airborne-hunk-of-steel perplex. They may use Xanax or whiskey to mute concerns about gravity.

The lucky ones will sleep, undrugged. I watch the sleepers. I make a study of them. These are seeming mortals who, though in coach (in infantilizing seats complete with baby trays that trap them in their own refuse until mommy clears their place), conk out.
With the closed-mouth solemnity of a dignitary lying in state, airplane sleepers seem to me shamanistic. They’re at one with the Virgin Atlantic or JetBlue heavens. In the passenger murmur, overhead beeps and engine hum they hear a lullaby.

Sometimes airplane sleepers use props: that neck donut, earplugs, sleep masks. Surely Lunesta or Ambien sparkles in many veins. But I like to believe that the best of them — and oh how I’ve studied you, sleepers, though I have nothing to teach you in return — use nothing but their own evolved brains, which, as far as I can tell, they trick with small feints at horizontality and internal conjurings of Platonic dark and silence. Maybe this is what’s called meditation.

They evolve in some way — that’s it. That’s why the sleep I’m describing looks so easy, and not a little smug. The sleepers visit a higher plane than the plane. Their utter placidity suggests enlightenment and also efficiency. And this is what I most aspire to, right now: to be able to sleep, perfectly, on a plane.

If you can sleep on a plane, after all, you must have a higher consciousness that doesn’t stew about cramped quarters or fellow passengers. But you also arrive well rested. You use your time wisely. You recognize that people have been sleeping as long as there have been people; you don’t get hung up on brief fads like pillows, sheets and brushed teeth. Is it too grandiose to say that the airplane sleeper is in touch with his humanity in a profound way?

Why should it be so hard so sleep on a plane? In the middle ages, people commonly napped sitting up. Paintings of sleeping Elizabethans show them, too, propped up in alcoves. Even today, those keeping vigil manage to doze while upright, sleeping with “one eye open,” in the style of New York City doormen and subway riders. Sure, much of this vigil sleep consists of nodding off and then snapping to irritated semi-wakefulness. And that kind of sleep — in me, anyway, at some movies and all symphonies — produces obscure shame, and drool, more than refreshment. So probably what we need is the another kind. The kind the shamans know.

We ought to teach true, serene airplane sleeping in college, with a primer class as a high school elective. A full-dress course in the subject would include the history of aviation from Kitty Hawk to Marquis Jet; the state of immigration by air; the transformation of humankind to a race of nomads; the invention of time zones and datelines; the evolution of aerospace engineering and airplane design; and meditation practices from around the world.

You’d walk away from this wide-ranging exploration with an idea of how and why more than 700 million passengers took planes in America in 2010. You’d learn a lot about what work and family now are, and why so much travel is involved. And you might learn why the airlines are currently benighted, what the consequence of carbon emissions from airplanes might be and whether companies are wasting money on air travel for employees.

But you’d also learn how to sleep when your body is in a seat crammed among other seats installed for maximum profit.

You’d learn about the pressure in a plane. What the air is made of. How to breathe in it. How to avoid the dehydration and immobilization that can lead to traveler’s thrombosis — a clotting issue that can sometimes be fatal in air travelers. You may come to question how safe long flights are; you may wonder why so many people all over the world have to or want to flee where they are to go somewhere that’s too far away to walk or drive. What business or need or authority propels them?

You’d discover how social class affects travel — and why airplane passengers now graciously cede the best seats (really the only adequate ones) and humane gate treatment (really just basic kindness) to people who are paying larcenously for those things? Under what circumstances do consumers allow and accept this kind of discrimination?

As you learn how to fall asleep on planes — the Vipassana Buddhist tradition of meditation gives especially good results, I’ve found — you’ll attend to the interaction of their bodies with technology and design. In doing so, you may wonder what took them so long. You may think about other bodies and technology. You may come to study airplanes and specific flights.

You should ask, and determine, How many are here for business, and how many for pleasure? What is business and what is pleasure? Was this flight necessary? What will these passengers find on one and another end of their flights? What was life like before we moved our bodies through the air so fast and so far every day?

All the while, you’ll acquire a skill. Plane sleep is among the most rewarding and satisfying and even impressive skills a modern person can acquire. And this is how a curriculum based around the acquisition of skills can expand understanding, open new questions and strengthen minds.

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Virginia Heffernan began writing for The Times in 2003 — first as a television critic in the Arts section, then as an Internet columnist at the Sunday Magazine. The co-author (with Mike Albo) of the comic novel “The Underminer,” she has been an editor at Harper’s and Talk magazines, and has written for The New Yorker, Mother Jones and Slate, where she was that magazine’s first television critic. She has a Ph.D. in English from Harvard. Her book, “Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet,” is forthcoming from Free Press.